New York Abandons Psychics

As part of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's welfare-to-work effort, the city set up Business Link to connect businesses that needed workers and welfare recipients who needed jobs. According to a report in the New York Times, and then picked up by various news services, among the businesses that applied to this project was Psychic Network, a 900 number service providing psychic readings to the public. Welfare workers could be trained by this firm to provide Tarot readings over the telephone and the city would help out for the expense of training. When the news broke, the city backed out of the deal, and Psychic Network was no longer involved in Business Link. No information is available about how many new psychics were trained before the program ended.

Louisiana Accepts Fortune Tellers

A law in Iberia, Louisiana banning fortune telling was struck down by a federal judge. According to a news report in the Mobile Register, the judge argued that the law, intended to protect citizens against fraud, violated the principle of free speech.

The lawsuit that resulted in the law being invalidated was brought by the ACLU on behalf of a psychic whose office had been closed down by the town’s law.

Ouija Board Pleases Plenty

The Ouija Board ® game has a bad reputation for causing negative experiences. To test this idea, John Palmer, Rhine Research Center, Durham, NC conducted a survey of readers of Fate magazine. He found, according to his report published in the Journal of Parapsychology, that ninety per cent of those responding claimed that they had experienced a successful communication with a spirit on at least one occasion.

On the other hand, about sixty five per cent also claimed to have had at least one negative experience with the game. Also, about fifty per cent reported that they experienced at some point a compulsion to use the game.

Take a Short Nap!

“If common wisdom holds true and we learned everything we need to know in kindergarten, then what happened to nap time?” So asks RealAge.com, an online service that brings news you can use to improve your longevity. In a recent report, they noted that brief naps are worth the time spent loafing.

They noted that investigators in Japan found that study participants who took a 15-minute nap were more alert than the participants who napped for 45 minutes. Results of the study confirmed that a 15-minute post-lunch nap also can increase productivity in the afternoon.

It might be worth learning how to doze off briefly after lunch.

For more information, see www.realage.com

Issues Arise in Religion and Health

As more studies suggest a positive relation between religion and health, a great number of issues become of concern to doctors. In a review of this growing trend toward grappling with religious issues in medical care, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, Linda Gundersen notes that a major concern is to distinguish religion, as in beliefs and church attendance, from spirituality, such as creating a relationship with a higher power. Another concern is when a doctor should encourage religious or spiritual practice. Being married is a positive factor for health, for example, but does that mean a doctor should recommend to their unmarried patients that they should get married? More medical schools are incorporating the topic of spirituality into their training. Should doctors pray with patients who ask for it or refer them to spiritual specialists who may be more competent in prayer? Regardless of one’s position on these issues, their consideration and debate is bringing more of the doctors’ humanity into medical practice.

For the full text of the report, see http://www.acponline.org/journals/annals/18jan00/gundersen.htm

Earth’s Ice is Melting Fast

“The Earth's ice cover is melting in more places and at higher rates than at any time since record keeping began. Reports from around the world compiled by the Worldwatch Institute show that global ice melting accelerated during the 1990s-which was also the warmest decade on record.” So states Lisa Mastny in news release prepared for the Worldwatch Institute. Ice in the Arctic Sea, for example, has been reduced by forty percent since the 1960s.

The impact of this melting will be more than simply raising the level of the oceans. The ice forms a reflective barrier around the planet, sending some of the sun’s heat back into space. As this ice cover diminishes, the earth’s warming will accelerate.

For the full report, see http://www.worldwatch.org/alerts/000306.html

Sleeping on it Helps Learning

It takes between six and eight hours of sleep to make permanent any newly learned skill. Past research has suggested a relationship between sleep, dreaming, and pressing today’s experiences into long term memory. Now researchers have established the role of sleep in solidifying learned skills.

In this research, conducted at Harvard University Medical School and the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston, and published in The Journal of Cognitive

Neuroscience, trained college students how to perform a demanding visual task monitoring events on a computer screen. After a period of training, the students showed improvement in this task. Retesting students later, however, showed that the level of improvement remained constant or increased further, depending upon when the restesting was conducted. The only condition under which there was further improvement were among those students who had at least eight hours of sleep, involving both deep sleep and dreaming.

The students who were able to sleep and dream after their training also showed improved performance, relative to the other students, two days after the training was conducted.

For more information see http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/030700hth-sleep-memory.html